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Monday, 1 February 2016

James' Take: The Division Beta PC Hacks

On Thursday last week, Ubisoft's new game The Division has had a closed beta exclusive to those who pre-ordered the game, which has proven very popular with gamers, with countless Twitch streams and YouTube videos going up of the beta, which is great. However, there has been a case of hackers on the PC version of the game.

Posts on Reddit have appeared saying that the way the netcode has been created is giving players easy access and is easy to mess with. This allows hackers to access and change players statistics because of of this data is stored on the client side which isn't checked or verified (a way of detecting whether people are cheating).

Following these hacks, people have seen hacks such as unlimited ammo, invisibility, shooting through solid walls and faster running speed, as seen here.

This has lead to boosting their PvP oriented Dark Zone rank to 255, which shouldn't be possible as the beta caps levelling to level 12. This also allows people to unlock one of the best weapons in the Dark Zone, the Caduceus Assault Rifle.

This was made worse when a Ubisoft community manager called Natchai responded to these posts on Reddit saying that they were not actually hacking, merely exploiting a few known glitches that exist within the beta build. This is weird because Ubisoft went to great lengths to protect Rainbow Six Siege which is completely online orientated, however they completely omitted this protection in The Division's beta build.

Ubisoft has just over a month to solve these problems, so this shoudn't be a problem when the game releases, but it goes to show how easily games like this can be altered and hacked in the ways shown. The beta has also been extended for another 24 hours, until 2nd February at 3AM PT.

Tom Clancy's The Division is due to launch on the 8th March 2016 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.